Dr Joanna Freer

Biography

I completed my undergraduate degree in English literature with Italian at the University of Sussex in 2005, spending my third year as an Erasmus exchange student at Universita degli Studi di Roma Tre, in Rome. Following this I taught English language for a year in Valencia, Spain, before returning to the UK to do my MA in English: Issues in Modern Culture at UCL. In 2008 I returned to Sussex to do research for my PhD, which was awarded in 2012. My thesis was entitled '"A little parenthesis of light": Pynchon and the Counterculture,' and examined the political philosophy expressed in the writing of the American postmodernist Thomas Pynchon via analysis of his texts' responses to various groups, individuals, theories and movements of the 1960s counterculture, with chapters on the Beats, the New Left, the psychedelic movement, Black Power, and the Women's Movement. I remained at Sussex as an Associate Lecturer and Tutor until 2015, when I took up the position of Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Exeter. In 2017 I was reappointed as a Lecturer in American Literature.